Elizabeth Bishop

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Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar.
Born February 8, 1911(1911-02-08)
Worcester, Massachusetts
Died October 6, 1979 (aged 68)
Boston, Massachusetts
Occupation Poet, 1933-1979,
Poet Laureate of the United States, 1949-1950
Nationality American
Literary movement Modernism
Domestic partner(s) Lota de Macedo Soares, 1952 - 1967
Alice Methfessel, 1971 - 1979
Influences
Influenced

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979), was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956.

Contents

[edit] Youth

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father died when she was eight months old, Bishop’s mother descended into mental illness and was institutionalized in 1916. Although Bishop’s mother would live until 1934 in an asylum, they would not meet again. Effectively orphaned, Bishop lived with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, a period she would later idealize in her writing.[1]

Bishop boarded at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, where her first poems were published by her friend Frani Blough in a student magazine.[2] She entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, shortly before the stock market crash. In 1933 she co-founded Con Spirito, a rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy (one year her senior), Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark.[3]

[edit] Young writer

Bishop was greatly influenced by the poet Marianne Moore[4] to whom she was introduced by the librarian at Vassar in 1934. Moore took a keen interest in Bishop’s work, and at one point Moore dissuaded Bishop from attending Cornell Medical School, in which the poet had briefly enrolled herself after moving to New York City following her Vassar graduation. It was four years before Bishop addressed ‘Dear Miss Moore’ as ‘Dear Marianne,’ and only then at the elder poet’s invitation. The friendship between the two women, memorialized by an extensive correspondence (see One Art), endured until Moore's death in 1972. Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" (1955) contains allusions on several levels to Moore's 1924 poem "A Grave." [5]

Bishop traveled widely and lived in many cities and countries, many of which are described in her poems. She lived in France for several years in the mid-1930s, thanks in part to the patronage of Vassar friend, Louise Crane, who was a paper-manufacturing heiress. In 1938 Bishop purchased a house with Crane at 624 White Street in Key West, Florida. While living there Bishop made the acquaintance of Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, who had divorced Ernest in 1940.

She was introduced to Robert Lowell by Randall Jarrell in 1947. She wrote the poem "Visits to St. Elizabeth's" in 1950 as a recollection of visits to Ezra Pound when he was confined there. She also met James Merrill in 1947, and became a close friend of the poet in later years.

[edit] Writing career

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In 1946, Marianne Moore suggested Bishop for the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry, which Bishop won. Her first book, North & South, was published in 1,000 copies. The book prompted Randall Jarrell to write that “all her poems have written underneath, I have seen it.”[6]

Bishop, who struggled financially through much of her career, increasingly relied on grants, fellowships, and awards to support her writing. Upon receiving a substantial $2,500 travelling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College in 1951, Bishop set off to circumnavigate South America by boat. Arriving in Santos, Brazil in November of that year, Bishop expected to stay two weeks but stayed fifteen years.

While living in Brazil in 1956, Bishop received the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetry, North & South — A Cold Spring. She later received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as two Guggenheim fellowships and an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. In 1976, she became the first woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and remains the only American to be awarded that prize.[7]

Bishop often contributed articles to The New Yorker, and in 1964 wrote the obituary for Flannery O'Connor in The New York Review of Books.

Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years. For a short time she taught at the University of Washington, before teaching at Harvard University for seven years. She also taught at New York University, before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She often spent her summers in her summer house in Maine, on an island called North Haven.

[edit] Career as translator

It was during her time in Brazil that Elizabeth Bishop became greatly interested in the languages and literatures of Latin America.[citation needed] Amongst the many poets she translated into English and was influenced by, were the great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, as well as the great Brazilian poets: João Cabral de Melo Neto and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, of whom she said :

“ I didn't know him at all. He's supposed to be very shy. I'm supposed to be very shy. We've met once — on the sidewalk at night. We had just come out of the same restaurant, and he kissed my hand politely when we were introduced.[8] ”

[edit] Personal life

Elizabeth Bishop has become an iconic lesbian poet.[citation needed] She had affairs with women and two long term relationships. The first was with Brazilian socialite and architect Lota de Macedo Soares[9] Soares was descended from a prominent and notable political family; the two lived as a couple for fifteen years. However, in its later years the relationship deteriorated, becoming volatile and tempestuous, marked by bouts of depression, tantrums and alcoholism.[citation needed] Bishop had an affair with another woman and ultimately left Lota and returned to the United States. Soares, suffering from depression, followed Bishop to America, and committed suicide in 1967.[10]

The second was with Alice Methfessel whom Bishop met in 1971, beginning a relationship with her. Methfessel became Bishop's partner and, after her death, her literary executor.[11]

[edit] Death

On 6 October 1979 Bishop died of a cerebral hemorrhage in her apartment at Lewis Wharf, Boston. She is buried in Worcester, Massachusetts.[12]

[edit] Works

Poetry:

  • North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946)
  • A Cold Spring|Poems: North & South — A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955)
  • A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1956)
  • Questions of Travel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965)
  • The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969)
  • Geography III, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976)
  • The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983)
  • Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)[13]

Other works:

  • The Diary of "Helena Morley," by Alice Brant, translated and with an Introduction by Elizabeth Bishop, (Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957)
  • "Three Stories by Clarice Lispector," Kenyon Review 26 (Summer 1964): 500-511.
  • The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968)
  • An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry edited by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil, (Wesleyan University Press (1972)
  • The Collected Prose (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984)
  • One Art: Letters, selected and edited by Robert Giroux, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994)
  • Exchanging Hats: Paintings, edited and with an Introduction by William Benton, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996)
  • Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, by Carmen L. Oliveira; translated by Neil K. Besner, (Rutgers University Press, 2002)[9]

[edit] Awards and honors

[edit] Trivia

Bishop's poem "One Art" is featured in the film In Her Shoes when Cameron Diaz's character Maggie reads it to a bedridden Professor in a nursing home.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Elizabeth Bishop. Worcester Area Writers. Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Retrieved on 2008-04-25.
  2. ^ Elizabeth Bishop Prize Winners. The Blue Pencil. Walnut Hill School. Retrieved on 2008-04-25.
  3. ^ Elizabeth Bishop, American Poet. Elizabeth Bishop Society. Vassar College. Retrieved on 2008-04-25.
  4. ^ Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. University of Michigan Press (2001): 4. In an early letter to Moore, Bishop wrote: "[W]hen I began to read your poetry at college I think it immediately opened up my eyes to the possibility of the subject-matter I could use and might never have thought of using if it hadn't been for you. — (I might not have written any poems at all, I suppose.) I think my approach is so much vaguer and less defined and certainly more old-fashioned — sometimes I'm amazed at people's comparing me to you when all I'm doing is some kind of blank verse — can't they see how different it is? But they can't apparently."
  5. ^ Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2002): 141, 357 fn.78 and fn.79).
  6. ^ Poetry and the Age Jarrell, Randall University Press of Florida April 9, 2001 pg. 181
  7. ^ http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/neustadt/laureates.html
  8. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  9. ^ a b The Love of Her Life by Emily Nussbaum, a June 2002 review in The New York Times of Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares
  10. ^ Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares,, Oliveira, Carmen, Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0-813-53359-7, 2002
  11. ^ Bold Type: Essay on Elizabeth Bishop
  12. ^ Elizabeth Bishop at Find A Grave
  13. ^ Like a Jeweled Box Waiting at the Bottom of the Sea: Quinn Offers a New View of Elizabeth Bishop, a review of Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke Box in Moondance magazine June-Sept. 2006

[edit] Bibliography

 This article, while providing some complete reference citations, includes a list of references or external links, and its verifiability remains partly unclear because it has insufficient in-text citations.
You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations.
  • Costello, Bonnie (1991). Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674246896. 
  • Kalstone, David (1989). Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBN 0374109605. 
  • Millier, Brett (1993). Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520079787. 
  • Bishop, Elizabeth (1996). Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 0878058710. 
  • Travisano, Thomas (1988). Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0813911591. 

[edit] External links

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Persondata
NAME Bishop, Elizabeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Poet Laureate of the United States, 1949 - 1950
DATE OF BIRTH 8 February 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Worcester, Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH 6 October 1979
PLACE OF DEATH Boston, Massachusetts